Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday December 21, 2013 @08:28AM
from the stop-disrupting-the-peaceful-gridlock dept.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Business Insider reports that protesters have stopped a bus filled with Apple employees in San Francisco and a Google bus in Oakland. Tech companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook provide free buses that take their employees from San Francisco to their headquarters in the suburbs. Protesters are mad at the tech companies because the wealthy tech employees have driven up the price of housing in San Francisco, which is pricing out some people. The buses also use public transit stops, and some protesters think that's wrong. Between 70 and 100 protesters gathered for the blockade of Apple private tech shuttle to protest evictions in the city of San Francisco. The activists in San Francisco were from Eviction Free San Francisco, Our Mission No Eviction, Causa Justa /Just Cause. Protesters stood in front of a white shuttle bus holding banners and signs. Some peeked through cardboard signs fashioned in the shape of place markers on Google maps, with "Evicted" written across the front. Meanwhile violence occurred in Oakland, according to reports from IndyBay, as protesters unfurled two giant banners reading "TECHIES: Your World Is Not Welcome Here" and "Fuck off Google" and "a person appeared from behind the bus and quickly smashed the whole of the rear window, making glass rain down on the street. Cold air blew inside the bus and the blockaders with their banners departed." Two weeks ago, protesters stopped a Google bus."

This just in: The homeless and unemployed mobbed a bus full of people perceived to be rich, perhaps unaware of the 60-80 hour work weeks endured by software engineers, that once you take that into consideration, many in the industry make at, or less, than minimum wage.

-_- Guys... if you're gonna have a protest against the rich, go pitch a tent on the CEO's lawn, not in the middle of the street where a bunch of people only doing slightly better than you are take the bus to work every day. Not only will you win an Irony award from me, but you'll get arrested for obstructing traffic too -- and rightfully so. Time and place. First two things you learn in activism. Time. Place. Learn it.

And the rich desk jockeys don't understand what it's like to not have food to eat or a place to sleep or what it's like to do back breaking manual labor in the freezing cold for 12 hours a day, every day just to be able to afford a small apartment and the basic necessities of life.

Exactly. If it's not Google or Apple employees, somebody else is going to want to live there. Popular living destinations always attract high costs of living...this isn't even a new thing, it's been going on for centuries, get over it.

Effectively these people are saying that just because they're poorer they're somehow more entitled to live there than somebody else who is willing to pay more. It's the 99% syndrome where you believe that because you are a member of a larger group means you're automatically more important.

You don't necessarily have to live in Nowhere, Montana either. Places like Phoenix and Houston are probably easier to find jobs in than SF and the cost of living is MUCH lower (both places are just slightly below the national average of cost of living, whereas SF is about two and a half times the national average.)

It's the 99% syndrome where you believe that because you are a member of a larger group means you're automatically more important.

Careful there, Sir Social Darwinist. Everybody is equally important. They have every right to protest. Peacefully. On the sidewalk. Just like the KKK, neo-nazis, and people who want Sarah Palin for President in 2016. Anyone who interferes with that's getting my American Free Speech Boot up their self-entitled ass.

But they didn't do that. They became violent. And 99%, 1%, or Percentile-agnostic, that's wrong. There is a time and a place for protesting, and it's not in front of the bus during the morning commute. That place is reserved for self-entitled bicyclists, angry motorists, and pedestrians on their cell phone wandering into traffic, thank you very much.

What happens when your "proper places to protest" are reduced to nowhere effective? When you're corralled into "free speech zones" far from private property, which is every square inch of the city? Important protests of the past have blocked up private businesses, and even impeded "innocent bystanders" from going about their life: consider the Woolworth's lunch counter sit-ins central to forcing de-segregation during the civil rights movement. If you limit protests to where they are harmless and invisible and never intrude on the priorities of the powerful, then you'll never get anything out of them --- leaving the disenfranchised masses even more desperate and angry.

Are you suggesting that these protesters were limited to useless "free speech zones"? Which SF laws or regulations keep people from protesting on the sidewalks? Keep in mind that there is an important distinction between trying to make your message seen -- a speech-focused protest -- and trying to disrupt a person or business who you think is behaving unjustly -- a conduct-focused protest. Sit-ins are an example of conduct-focused protest. Conduct-focused protests are ineffective when either the conduct or the target is chosen poorly, and both conduct and target were chosen poorly by the protesters in this case.

You're missing a couple of important points, not the least of which is that a Google bus has fuck all to do with the protester's predicament. Also the Woolworths protesters got the shit beaten out of them by the authorities. Do you remember the phrase "the whole world is watching" because that incident was a turning point in the civil rights movement where ordinary citizens were disgusted with the behaviour of the police on the nightly news.

As opposed to breaking a bus window of a few people on their morning commute?

Sorry but this is NOT an effective protest. Just like the Occupy protest in the park in my city (it made it all the way down here to Australia). It's one thing to protest directly at the 1% and quite another to tie up a park that was actually used by the 99% and was supposed to be part of a city festival for the 99%. I didn't care at all when they got evicted, and when your very peers don't care you are NOT effectively protesting.

This protest has similar issues. I don't know of any filthy rich people at Google or Apple. I'm sure there are some there, but I'm equally sure they don't catch the bus to work. A bunch of whining people who can't afford their homes protesting a bunch of workers who in all likely hood have massive mortgages or high rent and not a shitload of disposable income is also not an effective protest.

The "proper place to protest" is in a place where it makes a difference, you said it yourself through the use of the word "effective".What do you think will happen here? Will a bunch of workers suddenly realise that the protesters are right, and quit their jobs only to have their house repossessed? No. The protesters aren't winning hearts and minds here. They aren't making a difference, they are simply causing a minor inconvenience to their peers. This is not effective.

This goes doubly for the method of protest using language and violence. They want us to see desperation? I see thugs.

According to the story 1 person became violent and attacked property, and with 'they became violent' you unfairly called them all violent, a word which is most often used to describe actions which physically harm people.

Gov't agents have a history of infiltrating organisations and promoting or committing violence in their name in order to discredit them, you should remember that before blaming the action of 1 person on the whole group that they claim to represent./they're still all idiots though, the supply and demand of housing is down to the gov't and property developers, not a few of Google's minions.

If it's not Google or Apple employees, somebody else is going to want to live there. Popular living destinations always attract high costs of living...

It's popular in part because of the tech employees. You're not looking at this quantitatively. While SF has never been cheap, the tech employees increase demand and hence price. Regardless of whether you agree with the protestors, they do understand supply and demand.

with modest jobs (think service sector, utility technician, etc.) until recently. The cost of living in SF is rising quite rapidly, correlated with the increase in value of firms like Facebook, Twitter and others. Especially correlated with such companies' appearances on the public stock exchanges, which gives their employees a lot of purchasing power, which escalates the prices of housing, property tax rates, rents and so forth.

"Ordinary" jobs (jobs with compensation not de facto indexed to the rise of technology company valuations) don't keep up with increases in local costs of living in areas like SF or San Jose. This hits pretty hard on somebody, for example, like a service tech at a sewage processing plant. That's a moderately skilled job, one that provides real value to the community. Somebody who has filled that job well for 20 years, and who has been able to live in SF on their earnings, quite suddenly finds themselves being priced out of their community. How? Escalating property taxes (based on escalating home prices driven by demand from ISO-enriched techies); increased rents (same reason + others), increased prices of goods and services, etc. After 20 years, they find they can't keep up. Suddenly, living in SF is a "luxury".

All they did was do a good, useful job, maybe raise a family, contribute to making a good community - in short, all the stuff we'd like Americans to do - and they're priced out through no fault of theirs. It's a problem for them, and it's a problem for all of us. It doesn't seem like a problem to those who are on the techie compensation skyrocket, but it is. They just won't notice the damage as soon as others around them.

Same thing happened in Aberdeen, Scotland during the 1980's. Oil workers were getting paid £50K/year for two week on/two week off contracts working on the oil rigs. Oil workers liked being in the city for all the pubs and nightclubs. That shot up the prices of homes such that other people such as teachers, technicians, nurses couldn't afford to rent never mind buy flats or apartments. Teachers even went on strike over this. The solution? Teachers got pay rises so they could afford cars and commute in from 10 miles away, and they converted the school playgrounds into car parks. For nursing the solution was just to bring in cheap foreign labor.

And it's not just big cities either... the same has happened here in the Kitsap County are twice. Once when they built the new sub base at Bangor in the 70's, and again from the late 80's when Seattle grew big on the tech boom.

Folks that bought a house and a little land in what were then fairly remote areas intending to retire there... suddenly found themselves taxed out of them when subdivisions started sprouting up next door.

Never ceases to blow my mind when people outside the US think 10 miles is a commute. I am not criticizing, it is just an interesting divergence of viewpoint.

Perhaps it's because roads in a lot of places are not very straight or even particularly smooth so that means a journey will take longer. Also, in 1980's UK, probably most house-holds only had one car, so being forced to buy a car to get to work is another expense. And fuel costs more in the UK. Oh, and also, driving a manual car with a little 1.3litre straight-four manual transmission versus (say) a 3 litre v6 automatic probably makes a journey seem a bit longer too. Especially with the rain druming on the

All they did was do a good, useful job, maybe raise a family, contribute to making a good community - in short, all the stuff we'd like Americans to do - and they're priced out through no fault of theirs. It's a problem for them, and it's a problem for all of us. It doesn't seem like a problem to those who are on the techie compensation skyrocket, but it is. They just won't notice the damage as soon as others around them.

But as far as techies go, it's also true: all they did was do a good, useful job, raise a family, and contribute to making a good community. Yet the protesters in question seem to think that the solution is kicking the techies out.

That's not as big an issue for long time California residents, like your 20 year veteran sewer tech, as it might be in other parts of the country. Here in California we have this little thing called Proposition 13 [wikipedia.org]. This was passed by the voters in 1978 and it limited property taxes to 1% of the assessed value (retroactive to 1975 assessed values for those who owned their homes as of 1978) with an allowed increase in assessed value of not more than 2% annually. This amendment to the state constitution is pro

So you worked for years, decades maybe to make your neighborhood a desirable place to live. Got on the school's PTA, residents association, neighborhood watch, voted every election, helped clean up the housing stock. Now someone with more money wants to live there, so GTFO peon. Thanks for your hard work, now fuck off.

Actually, I don't see the problem here. If a city prices out all its low-paid workers who keep the toilets and streets clean and the buses running, then something will change. It's a self-correcting problem.

I see I've been modded Funny, but I'm entirely serious: if it's too expensive for janitors and waiters to live in a city (or commutable distance), something will happen. Either the wages for those jobs will go up, to get people to take those jobs, or the wealthy people living there will get sick of having nasty toilets and self-serve restaurants and dirty streets, and will move elsewhere, which means the cost of housing there will fall, so that poorer people can move back in.

Or, maybe they'll just learn to like dirty streets. Just look at NYC. There's lots of very wealthy people there who don't seem to mind that the sidewalks are all nasty and it smells like a sewer; they're all perfectly happy to pay ridiculous rents there for ramshackle little apartments and commute on an ancient, foul-smelling, noisy subway system that looks pathetic compared to subways in European cities.

Most of us "desk jockeys" started out that way. Hell, right out of high school I started in the Army in a combat arms MOS, which some job indices consider to be one of the worst jobs you can possibly have. I lost that job after a year due to problems with my eyesight. Without even counting that, I can guarantee you I've seen much worse hardship than you have. I'm not bitter over it; quite the opposite as it made me stronger. The difference between people like you and people like me is that we find our way around these problems instead of taking that bitterness out on other people and smashing their bus windows in.

Can't afford a small apartment in New York? No shit, it's because it's expensive as hell to live there. If you crave the city, try some place like Miami which is much cheaper. Sure it's not New York, but I can almost guarantee you a better quality of life because you'll be living within your means.

at least with Oakland you are talking about a historically economically depressed area. Are you saying you want to move the entire city of Oakland to the outlying regions. You think that that may even be possible? Oakland is also a historically violent place. So good luck with that.

Nice story bro. I do understand. I worked hard to keep food on the table and a roof over my family's head. I worked outside from dawn to almost dawn no matter the weather. I took a risk by continuing my education using student loans while working full time. It paid off in the end.

Take your bullshit story that accuses others of living like royalty elsewhere.

I love the ACs below that slings arrows from hidden view. girlintraining makes a value point and I'd mod her up. If you are going to protest, TIme and place do matter. Also you audience matters and picking on a bus load of techies expends too much cap;ital on a little target. Had they protested in front of google, had the, as she suggested, parked themselves in front of the people who are really driving up prices then they could garner more positive interest in their cause. All they did was pissed of p

She makes a valid point but I'd say it's not really relevant. People are protesting about their conditions and are going after a soft target because the people to blame for their conditions are not as easy a target or even easy to identify.See also attacks on "those migrants that are taking our jobs" for similar irrelevant soft target stupidity.

She makes a valid point but I'd say it's not really relevant. People are protesting about their conditions and are going after a soft target because

... Because they're cowards. When Martin Luther King marched, he marched in the deep south, in the open streets. When Ghandi protested, he sat in plain public view, risking death, to champion non-violent revolution. In fact, you look back at the major protests and civil rights battles in this country and you'll find that "soft targets" weren't on the menu. That's what we call biting the hand that feeds you.

If you got a problem with The Man, go camp on The Man's front lawn, and make sure the whole world, and especially him, knows it. Don't instead decide to double park The Man's janitor so he can't get to work in the morning. There's nothing noble about that... it's the move of a coward raging in his own impotence.

If you got a problem with The Man, go camp on The Man's front lawn, and make sure the whole world, and especially him, knows it.

The man's front lawn is surrounded by a very high fence, with the house set off from view of the street by several acres (possible patrolled by armed guards who will shoot trespassers). You really think you can walk up to the front door of Google, Apple, or Facebook executives' house and leave door hangers telling them what naughty boys they've been? That their staff won't route them to the helipad instead of the Bentley if their street to work is blocked by protestors? Today's immense wealth disparities mean the oligarch class can live entirely insulated from any public street where protestors can legally and ineffectively gather. Shouting at The Man's front yard's external fortifications won't get you anywhere.

During the "major protests and civil rights battles in this country," the exact same concerns you raise --- that only innocent, hard-working folks were harmed by obstructions to streets and businesses --- were spouted by the powers-that-be opposing change. If you protest according to the rules of the rich and powerful, all you'll get is the continued rule of the rich and powerful.

We are starting to see the social unrest caused by the wealth disparity in the US - a disparity of Third World proportions. You have people being left begind in the economic prosperity and to add insult to injury, they are then told it's because of their character: unwillingness to work hard, poor money skills, getting the wrong education or degree. (It's funny, back in the 90s, all those tech people were saying "follow you passions! That's how you make it big!" and "We only hire people who are passionate about what they do!")

The techies were just the first targets. Don't worry, the CEOs will come next - if they can get through shareholder paid for armed security. Security for big shots is a BOOMING business, btw.

This is what happens when people feel like there's no hope for them to better their lives. They see that "work hard" means nothing when you have assholes who know the right people become billionaires with little or no effort - they just had the contacts to folks who knew how to set it up to sucker investors with an IPO.

It's starting to happen folks! Social issues like this were solved in the 30s but we went BACKWARDs in the last couple of decades.

We need 1950s income tax rates back; which was the most prosperous times in US history. Back then working hard and having "good" character got you some where.

We are starting to see the social unrest caused by the wealth disparity in the US - a disparity of Third World proportions.

Starting to? The revolution came, and its high water mark was about a year ago when Homeland Security's jack-booted thugs coordinated a nationwide crackdown, arresting and imprisoning over six thousand protesters in a single day. Anyone remember Occupy? Nope. The police came and erected giant tarps and then moved in tanks, troops, and industrial equipment, and did a clean sweep of every protester on Wall St. in just a few hours, then took down the temporary walls, shined up the signs a little, and buffed out the dents where the protesters were thrown into walls, the ground, etc. And nary a word was spoken about it in our press.

Dude, look at China -- how often do you hear of protests there? You don't. Because the people there get rounded up and are never heard from again. And now in America, we have the highest per capita imprisonment rate of any country on Earth. Put two and two together.

Over six thousand protestors in a single day? I think you are hallucinating friend. The biggest day was 700 on the Brooklyn Bridge. After that the NYPD was careful not to perform mass arrests. I think you should probably stop spreading lies.

What we need is a MASSIVE overhaul of national taxation so it doesn't discourage savings and capital investment in the USA. The current tax code is rife with corruption, is 70,000-plus pages of tax law so complex that even the IRS can't figure half of it out, costs Americans just about US$500 BILLION per year in compliance costs, and drives millions of jobs, thousands of factories, hundreds of corporate headquarters, and (by some estimates) around US$15 TRILLION in American-owned liquid assets to foreign financial institutions as a means of income tax avoidance.

Economic and political insanity, in my humble opinion. Maybe it's time to seriously look at the no-loophole flat rate tax proposed by Steve Forbes in 1996 _at minimum_ as the tax reform, a reform that would encourage savings and capital investment staying in the USA and free up as much as US$375 BILLION per year now spent on tax compliance for more productive purposes.

It's true that wealth disparity is a big issue in US, but in this particular case it is a red herring - wealth disparity between blue collar and white collar workers, as is the case here, is so low as to be a blip on the radar. The true source of inequality are people who own most of the wealth, and live off the rent (stock dividends etc) from that wealth. When compared to them, it doesn't matter whether you're flipping burgers or writing code at Apple - what you get in return for your labor is chump change

The disparity in the US is huge, yes, but being poor in the US is a picnic compared to the third world. No one in the US needs to starve. You have a roof over your head. You have at least some money for luxuries like a mobile phone and a TV. Comparing this to third world poverty shows that you've never been to the third world.

That is false and you have absoutely no clue. See the chart. [theatlantic.com] We are on the level of some African countries - and some of those Third World shitholes are actually better than we are.

The rest of that statement show someone who has a very very cloistered life.

Taking too many company buses and living on the company "campus" are we?

They are idiots, pure and simple.

That's what I think of all the SF tech companies. They are all just advertising companies with a delusion of being innovative.

Disparity and poverty are very different. The US has quite high disparity, but the average wealth is quite high, so the poor in the US are in general not nearly as poor as the poor in 3rd world countries.

Disparity and poverty are both bad and both cause very serious problems, but they are different.

-_- Guys... if you're gonna have a protest against the rich, go pitch a tent on the CEO's lawn, not in the middle of the street where a bunch of people only doing slightly better than you are take the bus to work every day.

Slightly better? That is bullshit.

I think this is a misguided protest, but the real problem as always is that there are a lot of have nots that think they're haves, and are thus on a different page and contributing to the problem. Are these google employees part of that problem? Sure. Google is not unique in attempting to save money by not improving communities, but that's what needs to happen, not this busing bullshit.

This just in: The homeless and unemployed mobbed a bus full of people perceived to be rich, perhaps unaware of the 60-80 hour work weeks endured by software engineers, that once you take that into consideration, many in the industry make at, or less, than minimum wage.

Now assume an 80-hour work week, so it's still over 25 bucks an hour. And these engineers get *lots* of perks, including high end health care plans and free transportation to work. Bear in mind that a substantial chunk of a working class salary is spent taking care of these kinds of expenses, and there are lots of non-monetary hassles associated with maintaining a car in a big city.

The *entry level* salaries for Google and Apple engineers in Silicon Valley is $105K. That's over fifty bucks an hour assuming a 40-hour work week.

I said software engineers, not software engineers at google. So you can knock about 10 grand off right there [computeren...rydata.com]. And until you provide a citation about how much Google pays its employees, we're going with the state average. $95k a year comes out to $45.67 an hour. This is actually more than San Fransciso lists for the profession -- $40.66. We'll go with the more generous figure here.

So you're making $45.67 an hour. Woo! Big time money now. But Uncle Sam just showed up, and he wants his cut. Your biweekly was $

You know, that might be part of the problem, too. With a 60-80 hour work week, how much time do you think software engineers have to participate in the community itself? A neighborhood isn't just a set of nice buildings you drive past in-between work/sleep cycles.

Software developers (especially at Google and Apple) do not make "at, or less, than minimum wage"; this is absolutely absurd. According to sfgate.com [sfgate.com] the average salary in San Francisco right is $110,950 for application developers and slightly higher for systems developers.

According to the same link, food service workers make and average of $22,180 a year in San Francisco. That's a very wide income gap, indeed.

So engineers at some companies work long hours, so what? Most engineers (myself included) love the work they do, and it's a far cry from working multiple jobs with little or no benefits to barely be able to feed your family and be unable to afford a nice place to live.

Not only will you win an Irony award from me, but you'll get arrested for obstructing traffic too -- and rightfully so. Time and place. First two things you learn in activism. Time. Place. Learn it.

The time and place for activism: somewhere with a lot of impact and that probably means it should be extremely disruptive to a lot people. Sure it's a pain in the ass to have your commute screwed up by striking transit employees or something like this bus protest. But that's a cost of democracy, and we're all better off if people are free to protest and to be disruptive. Without disruption, protests are too easily ignored and the power of the masses is too easily constrained. To hell with "free speech zones" and protest permits. I agree that protestors shouldn't overdo it, or they'll lose the support of the masses. Unfortunately in the US, they rarely get any support at all. People cling to their sense of entitlement and have no willingness to stomach some inconvenience for the sake of the greater good.

This just in: The homeless and unemployed mobbed a bus full of people perceived to be rich, perhaps unaware of the 60-80 hour work weeks endured by software engineers, that once you take that into consideration, many in the industry make at, or less, than minimum wage.

So, let's use your unsubstantiated upper figure of 80 hours per week, and pay for those software engineers at the minimum wage, which is $8 in CA. Annualized salaries are approximately 2,000 times hourly wage.

So, for those software engineers, once you take 80 hours per week into consideration, make an effective minimum wage if their base salaries are... $32,000.

Do you really believe anyone on those buses with the title "software engineer" makes less than $60,000 base salary? Given that 80 hours per week

If techies accepted jobs that were just barely above the poverty line, they wouldn't be able to afford expensive houses, and the protesters would focus their efforts on more deserving targets like all the bankers and lawyers who live and work in the city (and who would still be able to bid housing prices up).

You know, because this country's problems are caused by paying good wages to STEM workers, and the solution is clearly to not do that. Someone should let politicians know.

I don't agree with the protesters, but their argument is that by providing these busses, Apple and Google are encouraging their employees to live in the area the busses service.

Previously the employees would have chosen to live somewhere convenient, but more expensive, due to the need to drive themselves. Now the Apple and Google employees can buy up places near the bus routes, causing a mini-housing shortage and driving up prices, thus pricing locals out of the housing market

A minimum 3-story building with underground parking requirement for all new commercial construction would go a long way towards fixing all of the land shortage in the Silicon Valley area.

Not really possible. Apple had to get a special waiver from Santa Clara to build the 6 4 story buildings on their Infinite Loop campus. They are actually configured structurally to be 5 story buildings, but the additional waivers fell through at the last minute, so they were stuck with 4 (while everyone else is stuck with the statutory 3). Santa Clara and San Jose don't want tall buildings.

That said, the folks I know who live in SF live there because there's nothing for them to do in the SV area. Being young, they like being able to walk from their apartments to the hottest clubs or concerts or whatever. Most of those folks move back out to the suburbs by the time they have their first kid, but there's always a new batch of youngsters waiting in the wings to take those apartments when they leave.

They practically roll up the sidewalks in SF at 9PM. If you want late night food, you have to go to some place in th

People erroneously think SF is a metropolis, like NY - it's not. By that standard, there's more late night food places in Ogden, Utah, than there is in SF.

It used to be, or at least, it was more like NY than it is now. But late-night stuff has been driven out of the city by gentrification. You could at least find stuff to do on the weekend nights, before.

So unless you are an alcoholic or a "club kid", you are not living in SF for the thriving night life.

Alcoholics are accommodated pretty much everywhere (except maybe Utah) but club kids live in LA or SD, where they actually still have clubs. They shut down all the good ones in the city, so the last ones left are not only shitty but shitty and crowded.

That is the fundamental flaw of property taxes - the taxes can go up even if your property stayed exactly the same just because a bunch of people around you overpaid.

I suppose then that as people move into an area and it develops economically, building up infrastructure, amenities, and things like, I don't know, public transportation... people should not be expected to pay more for those things? What you call overpaying, others call investing.

The fact was it was economically viable the day they started running the Google buses. That more people have opted to move into those areas because it offers a convenience is a consequence of this. But it's like people who flock to

That is the fundamental flaw of property taxes - the taxes can go up even if your property stayed exactly the same just because a bunch of people around you overpaid.

That's not a flaw. You don't in fact have a natural right to private property. And since we live in a capitalist society, money is used to decide who gets to have scarce things. The flaw lies in the distribution of wealth. If people who are superassholes weren't rewarded with economic success, then you wouldn't have the superassholes living in all the nice spots and so on.

That is the fundamental flaw of property taxes - the taxes can go up even if your property stayed exactly the same just because a bunch of people around you overpaid.

That's actually the purpose of property taxes. The alternative is to have some guy who owns a strawberry farm in the middle of what is now a major city just sitting on that property and impeding growth (sometimes they're just waiting for its value to go up), instead of selling it to someone who'll make better use of the property. (True story. Disneyland eventually bought the 52 acre farm for ~$90 million.)

What's best for you is not necessarily what is best for the public at large. Rising property taxes are a way to "encourage" people doing economically inefficient things with their property to sell to someone who could make better use of the property. "Better" defined based on what sort of business or residence the surrounding area has turned into. It's a less drastic measure than eminent domain.

The problem with the "bunch of people around you overpaid" scenario is that many municipalities are greedy and (1) increase property taxes every year, when a 5-year or 10-year average would help smooth out a lot of the bumps in market prices, and (2) don't have provisions for lowering property taxes when the value of real estate decreases. Otherwise, if the real estate value remains high, those people didn't overpay.

First, the idea that it's unique to California is preposterous (full disclaimer: I've never lived in California and never had any desire to). Second, there was no violence and the property damage was limited to one broken window. I don't particularly agree with these protestors, but the protests seem reasonable. Of course it's going to get publicity when you obstruct things - that's the idea.

I went to Berkeley

If that's the only place in CA you've ever lived, you have an extremely biased experience. When it comes to "frequent

The tech industry is not responsible for driving up housing prices. The greed of people who set housing prices is responsible for driving up housing prices. However, it is much harder to visibly protest the upscale equivalent of a slumlord (I guess still a slumlord), especially when such highly visible symptoms as environmentally friendly commuter buses are within easy reach.

Perhaps I made an unwarranted assumption. I assumed that the people complaining about being 'prized out of the market', so to speak, were renters, not home owners, because I've never heard of a home owner with a mortgage already in place complain about the value of his home going up. I assumed that the protestors were people who couldn't afford their rent because their landlords set higher prices (after their contracts were up) because they figured they could get away with it with this influx of affluent te

I've never heard of a home owner with a mortgage already in place complain about the value of his home going up.

Unless the new level of taxes prices a tight budget out of the local housing market.

I assumed that the protestors were people who couldn't afford their rent because their landlords set higher prices (after their contracts were up)

I understand what the dynamic of mixing rising prices with static income can do to borderline solvent families. It's a problem in any area that experiences a boom as there are folks on fixed incomes who do not benefit: teachers, city workers, retirees, etc.

People who rent space for a living are going to raise rates to whatever the market will bear... it's like a pay raise for them.

I don't think you can blame landlords for increasing prices when the value of the housing they're renting goes up. You can't expect landlords to continue to let houses they could sell and then use the proceeds to invest in something similarly risky with a better return (like housing elsewhere, for example). If the cost of housing is going up because there are more households who want them than housing available then its going to affect rents as much as prices - and, if it somehow doesn't because you use something like law to prevent it then you're still going to have the problem of how you choose who gets a house and who gets to be homeless or move elsewhere. A shortage of housing (or of good quality housing) is a physical problem that can only have real, physical answers, not financial ones - building more good housing, building something like high speed rail lines to expand the land area in use, or moving people (and, more to the point, their employers) elsewhere.

There'd be many ways they could move - new companies emerging in different places and old ones shrinking, hiring freezes in one office and increases in another, outright relocations. You'd have to ask an accountant/mover if you need to know the cost. The reasons for shouldering the cost could be many: better quality housing, lower commuting times, better quality of life, a way to attract staff who might not find that area appealing, lower office costs and so on. And, of course, if whole segments of the comm

Disclosure : I am a realtorI find this all rather amusing, values of homes and rental pricing is all based on supply and demand. it's a commodity. When a community has restrictive standards on building new residences, the values will increase. Same thing happens when new jobs come in from another location, buying/rental demand. Properties on the beach ( where I service ) have doubled in rental rates ( 5 years ago you could have rented an updated waterfront 2 bedroom for 2K, now the same place is asking 5K o

The tech industry is not only refusing to eat its own dog food, it's wilfully jacking up its costs and risk by insisting on stockpiling its live meat in one location.

I thought we were talking about San Francisco, not Mumbai. But on a different note, why do people live in New York when it costs so much to live there? Answer: Because that's where all the jobs are. And the infrastructure. It's a hundred square miles of urban superstructure built up over a hundred years. Duh. Why is it any kind of a surprise that tech businesses congregate together? Did we forget that human beings are social creatures? We are tribalistic. We naturally and instinctively seek out both social

I'm not convinced that planning permission stuff is going too far with government regulation. The thing is of course that stupid regulations are stupid. However, there is naturally a very strong imbalance: once a building has been built, it stays, no matter how stupid the decision to let it be built. If planning permission is not given, well, there's always next year.

There is an ever widen inequality gap in America. Gaps in wealth, income, education, access to healthcare, life expectancy, etc. Much attention has been paid to the life of the top 1% but not so much to the bottom 20%. Real incomes for them have stagnated or gone down over the last decade. The urine poor public education system gives little opportunity for upward mobility. Hunger, cold, and loss of housing are constant worries.

Meanwhile in congress, politicians want to cut social welfare programs, keep taxes on the wealthy at record low rates, give tax breaks for corporate jets, cut unemployment benefits, send the poor to fight stupid wars (how many of the Apple and Google employees have friends and family serving in the Middle East?). The list goes on and on. I am fighting the urge to blame this all on the Republicans because the Democrats don't really seem to want to fix the problem.

So the situation has devolved into this-- where the poor, disaffected, resentful masses with little hope of improving their lot see the gleaming buses give free rides to the Apple and Google employees with their free lunches. To be fair to the employees in the buses, they are probably not the really rich because they have onsite parking. First the spray cans. Next the torches, rocks and sickles. Meanwhile the politicians in Washington cry "Let them eat cake."

I thought that Google employees all payed for the rides, lunches and all with their work. After all, the money to pay all that has to come from somewhere, which is the result of their work (ie: the income produced by people using their products). And if they were not as successful, they would not have any of that.

You mirror my thoughts. At times I also most wish that republicans would take and hold all three branches. It will hasten the fall of this country and perhaps, maybe, possibly out of the upheaval, a better system can come to pass. Right now I feel democrats (or maybe better to say caring politicians) try to slow the fall, give hope to the hopeless and serve only to make this country suffer more. Gangrene slowly pervades our system, our society and the caring politician, a minority today, only allows the

You mirror my thoughts. At times I also most wish that republicans would take and hold all three branches. It will hasten the fall of this country and perhaps, maybe, possibly out of the upheaval, a better system can come to pass. Right now I feel democrats (or maybe better to say caring politicians) try to slow the fall, give hope to the hopeless and serve only to make this country suffer more. Gangrene slowly pervades our system, our society and the caring politician, a minority today, only allows the infection to spread, albeit slowly.

I'm sure if you grew up in San Francisco, you'd be delighted to clear out of your hometown and let the newcomers enjoy it. I remember San Francisco before the dot com boom. It had all the charm, but it was a lot more affordable to live there. Likewise I've seen Key West go from a place where funky people lived to a place where the people who serve you your drink have to commute from an hour further north.

I was once privileged to visit Hawaii on work. I say "privileged", because I got to work with Hawaiian

Exactly what is wrong with "gentrification"? One commenter on the linked article on IndyBay points out the City of Detroit as an example of what happens when the middle class leaves. Is that what they want for Oakland?

There's a difference between "the middle class leaves" (because middle-class jobs are gutted) and "the middle class is forced out of their homes by the upper-middle-class." The people being evicted are representative of the vast overwhelming majority of the population; general working people who keep a city going. Perhaps you don't believe anyone should be allowed to settle down and work and live in a small but reasonably comfortable home if they can't pull a six-figure salary; these people disagree. Maybe you don't worry about losing your home, having to move far out of town; losing your friends, community, school zone, and perhaps your job, too. Maybe you were raised with a silver spoon in your mouth, with zero experience of the actual struggles and concerns of the majority of working American families. But don't let your ignorance control your disdainful attitude towards the working class.

There's a difference between "the middle class leaves" (because middle-class jobs are gutted) and "the middle class is forced out of their homes by the upper-middle-class."

There's only so much San Francisco to go around. Why should the people who got there first have a right to it? We pretty much destroyed that precedent when we founded this nation on top of the natives' ground. In fact, if we follow American historical precedent, those people should not only be forced out of their homes, but also murdered, raped, etc.

Perhaps you don't believe anyone should be allowed to settle down and work and live in a small but reasonably comfortable home if they can't pull a six-figure salary

The issue is whether they should be able to live anywhere they want. The truth is that if the value of your home increases to the point that you can't afford to pay the property taxes, you can afford to sell your home and move someplace else. People are always complaining about civilization arriving where they live. Here's a nice example. There's some folks on our road who have been here apparently since before it was paved. One day I evaporated one of their chickens with the Astro because they couldn't keep them under control and they were out on the road. One of them decided to dart under the van as I was passing by it and the rest (and the chicken) is history involving a gigantic expanding spherical cloud of feathers behind the van. Their response was not to improve their coop, but to spray paint SLOW DOWN on the road, which is [a minor, admittedly irrelevant form of] vandalism. They did in fact do a crap job so it does in fact look like shit.

These are some people who wanted to live on a dirt road in bumfuck, but when civilization showed up, they didn't move. And let me tell you, their place is a crap little shit-shack, but they could have sold it to a grower and slid out of there long before now, and surely made a massive profit. They could move to some other shit-shack in this shitty town and actually improve their situation but they're married to a particular shitty piece of ground. And instead of making themselves happy, they're standing against the tide and being upset about it.

But civilization always arrives, and if I'd hit that chicken with the front of the vehicle and damaged the plastics, they'd have been liable because civilization recognizes that you can't have chickens running around the road. Instead of moving to where people won't be going by so fast, they demand that everyone else alter their behavior to please them. And the reality is that they could be living someplace nicer if they weren't so addicted to false stability. That little piece of ground could be wiped out by anything next week; since they have grossly inadequate clearings and fire danger has been increasing year on year, fire is a likely candidate. They have no security whatsoever in their tin box that could be opened with a can opener.

Maybe you were raised with a silver spoon in your mouth, with zero experience of the actual struggles and concerns of the majority of working American families.

Well, I was raised with beans and rice in my mouth, and I still think it's bullshit. You don't have a right to make the world stop around you. The only people I feel bad for in SF are the young people trying to get out. They haven't had time to make any money, and it's difficult to make any money in SF while paying living expenses. People pay for part of a room (often one which doubles as a hallway in the crappy floor plans of the narrow dwellings of SF) for what I pay for half a house (shared with my lady.) How is a youth going to climb out of that money well?

As I recall, housing prices in SF and environs were going astronomical long before Google existed. And seeing as Apple's been there since the 70's, it seems rather odd that "just recently" Apple is responsible for a price rise in housing.

No, these are private hire corporate buses. They travel a fixed long-distance route with a few stops with the last one being the corporate car-park, or a bus-stop right outside it. But they do use the public bus stops simply because they have safety markings on the road. The closest public transport equivalent would be what the UK called an "Express bus" which would only stop at a select number of bus stops in the city and at the far end of the bus route.

Despite all the complaints about a lack of housing, SV hasn't become more urbanized. Is there any reason for that other than zoning and other government imposed limits? If SV companies really wanted more housing in the area, they'd pressure the local governments to change that. It's absurd to complain about lack of housing when you don't see 10 story apartment buildings everywhere.

I own a house in Sunnyvale, near the Yahoo headquarters. My neighbors and I do not want more urbanization for the simple reason that it will increase the housing supply and lower our relative property values. That is the primary reason you do not see more urbanization in SV - the people who already own there do not want their property values to go down. We also tend to vote in the local elections much more so than renters.

Additionally, the transportation infrastructure in SV is strained as it is. It can literally take 45 minutes to an hour to drive 5 miles across town, public transit sucks, and there is not much hope of that improving. That makes it even harder for high-density developments to be approved - the infrastructure is not really there to support it and the people already living there do not want even more traffic to deal with.

That is the primary reason you do not see more urbanization in SV - the people who already own there do not want their property values to go down.

No, it's because they would have to pay most of the cost (increased traffic, more crime, etc.) while the additional sales and property tax revenue has to be shared with the rest of the city. It's the classic unscrupulous diner's dilemma [wikipedia.org].

It can literally take 45 minutes to an hour to drive 5 miles across town...

In most parts of the country, cities lament that people LIVE in the suburbs, and only WORK in the city, robbing them of the property taxes they need to support the crumbling social and economic infrastructure, causing a collapse in property values (Detroit is a perfect example, but other large cities have the same issues).

In California, when people make an effort to LIVE in the city, paying all those higher taxes and propping up all that social and economic infrastructure, they're protested for harming the poor by keeping the property values from collapsing.

Face facts, people - you can't have it both ways. If you don't want those middle-income people keeping your neighborhoods from turning into crack houses, you shouldn't complain when the landlords don't have to put up with any deadbeat who feels like squatting in their buildings.

Aside from perhaps breaking some obscure city ordinance about using public bus stops, this Google/Apple bussing plan is EXACTLY what left-leaners should loudly support. It saves on energy, pollution, and traffic - and adds a wealthier, local tax base to support the liberal programs that require significant tax revenue and generally reduce crime. A win, win - except that the protesters are trying to violently stop it.

Talk about cognitive dissonance for the left-leaning./ers. You can see it in the, "I hate to make it sound like.." like starts to posts, as if people don't want to attack the type of people they would've gladly jumped behind in most other cases... The 1% the past "occupy" movements have gone after is now THEM (developers), and the shoe is on the other foot? It shows just how dangerous and philosophically ignorant these protesters can be.

Instead of saying, "hey, hey - not US, dummies.. go get the RICH people!", maybe an open discussion and a little more political balance from people on both sides is in order?

When a place becomes desirable over a long period of time, lots of people want to move there. How cities manage this relatively good problem to have is very telling about the character of their politics.

San Francisco decided a long time ago that it didn't want very much new construction. Their land-use restrictions are among the most restrictive in the country, and even if you can get past them, the amount of red tape to either build something or renovate something (particularly if anybody thinks it has historical character, which is not a high bar in SF) combined with the frequency and ease of anti-development lawsuits means that the city has been encouraging people to come to town while adamantly refusing to find anywhere to put them.

This is the inevitable result of a certain kind of liberal mindset: the same people who are in the streets and protesting the lack of affordable housing are the ones who will file lawsuits and protest development that provides housing. It may not be the housing they like, but the thing about the housing market is that you have to have somewhere to put everybody. SF is like New York in this respect: the high end is fine, even if it costs a lot more to be rich in SF than most anywhere else in the United States. The low end, while hardly fine, is served through affordable housing: if you are willing to survive the Waiting Lists of Housing Limbo, you can qualify for a place to live, so long as you never make too much money. Politicians love this stuff because it lets them point at families that could never live in a place like that and take credit for solving the problem that they are making a lot worse, because there is no longer a middle to the housing market.

This problem isn't inherent to government-subsidized housing - you could figure out how to build and/or subsidize low-cost housing without completely distorting the market. But combine it with land-use restrictions and your average San Francsican's general unwillingness to tolerate tract homes and voila, nobody can afford to live there. Blaming Google and Facebook for this is not only ignorant, it's the worst kind of envy: you have what we want, so you must be responsible for the fact that we haven't got it.

Austin has experienced a similar boom to SF and some of the same problems, but even though we've failed on the infrastructure side, we didn't limit development to anywhere near the extent that SF has. Consequently, Austin is still the most expensive place to live in Texas, but the average cost per square foot is between 1/3 and 1/4 of what it is in San Francisco.

TL;DR: If you want everyone to have a place to live, you have to be OK with the fact that they won't all live in charming bungalows or 19th century restoration hardware displays. Anyone who thinks that getting rid of the tech sector in San Francisco is a solution should go visit Detroit to see what a city looks like when business leaves. Just don't call the cops or the fire department unless you have an hour to kill.

I don't normally respond to anonymous cowards, but since the point of the original comment was to combat populist ignorance, I'll bite.

I am well aware of the geographic limitations San Francisco has, and you're right that it does exacerbate the problem. But that puts all the more pressure on the levers that the citizens of SF do control. It is not "blanketed in buildings" because the city has made it impossible to either expand or renovate existing housing for anyone except the most determined developers, a

I have lived in the SF Bay Area almost my entire life. In this area, every single time anyone tries to build new urban housing, the left shows up and protests. Are you trying to build a new condo building? PROTEST. Trying to build new apartments? PROTEST. The political left has fought, tooth and nail, for decades, to restrict severely, or even to reduce the supply of housing in the SF Bay Area, and ESPECIALLY urban housing like high-rise apartment buildings. Then, the consequences of their actions occurred: the price of real estate went up, especially for renters.

When the price of real estate started going up, because of absolutely restricted supply, the left started rebelling against the consequences of its own actions.
They started protesting again--not against themselves who actually caused the phenomenon, but against Google, who had nothing to do with it. Now the left has people holding banners saying "FUCK GOOGLE" and "Techies not welcome here".

Of course, if the protestors really succeeded in "fucking Google" etc, and tech companies were really not welcome here, then silicon valley would have to move somewhere else. Then the tech industry which supports this entire area (like GM used to support Detroit) would vacate, and the tax base would implode, and San Francisco would increasingly resemble Detroit--not at first, of course, but gradually over decades. Then the left would protest the consequences of their own actions, once again. "FUCK GOOGLE FOR LEAVING", "FUCK TAX RECEIPTS FOR GOING DOWN" and so on. Perhaps they would demand that tech companies and workers continue to pay local taxes despite not working or living here anymore.

I find it ironic that one of the protesting organizations is called "just cause". Because "just cause" is what was already happening. People are getting what they DESERVE--unaffordable real estate--which is what they caused by their own actions. That is what "just" means, or used to mean.

Frankly, I think it should be easier to evict renters. If they do not allow the construction of new housing units, and they have never bought a house, then they should have nowhere to live. They have only themselves to blame.

I saw on the news that local residents hate you now and are preventing your workers from arriving to work on time. Please move your operations to our state and we will show how much we appreciate all your paid employees spending their money in our neighborhoods.